20 surprising Apple facts

You all know that Apple is the company behind iPhones, iPads, iPods, Macs and more, but did you know that it once also built a games console, one of the many flops in its 38-year history? And this is one of the more well-known items of Apple trivia. Have much do we really know about our favourite California company?

We’ve gathered together 20 of the most fascinating and surprising facts about Apple, so read on to brush up on your knowledge.

We’ll start with one that those who are very familiar with Apple as a business may already know, but we still think is a fact that many, many people won’t know. Apple had three co-founders: Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and a third who many people won’t have heard of: Ronald Wayne.

Wayne left the company just 12 days after it was founded, and sold his 10 per cent share for just $800 plus an additional payout of $1,500. The most crushing part is that his share would now be worth more than $60 billion. Thankfully, now 80 years old, Wayne says that he has no regrets.

Did you know that smoking near Apple computers invalidates your warranty – even if you have AppleCare?

Smokers have reported that Apple repair staff have refused to work on the machines due to perceived dangers of second-hand smoke. Apparently one customer complaint went all the way up to Steve Jobs’ office. The reply: “Nicotine is on OSHA’s list of hazardous substances and Apple would not require an employee to repair anything deemed hazardous to their health.”

Source: The Consumerist

Tim Cook has approximately 92,600 people working for him. And the number is growing rapidly: Apple has doubled in size in the last four years, and only had 14,000 employees before the launch of the iPhone.

Mind you, if that seems like a lot, what about Apple’s great rival Samsung? The company’s electronics division alone employs  275,133 people – more than Apple, Google and Microsoft put together.

Source: Statista

Apple has twice as much operating cash as the US Treasury.

Although, to be fair, Microsoft also has more cash on hand than the US Treasury. And Forbes’ Tim Worstall explains why this isn’t really the case because the government can just print more cash if it needs it.

Still, it’s fun to know.

If you look at the iPhone photographs in Apple adverts the time is always set to 9:41. This is the time Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone.

The creator of the iPod, Tony Fadell, offered the device to Philips and Real Networks first. They both turned it down, claiming they couldn’t really see a future in it.

Source

If you went back in time to 1991 and tried to buy all the parts that make up an iPhone, it would cost you more than $3m (about £1.9m). The RAM alone would cost you $1.44m.

It’s always worth bearing in mind that the path technology takes is hard to imagine, because what is only affordable to governments today may be commonplace in five years’ time.

Source; Tech Policy Daily

Apple is named Apple after the fruit, and because Silicon Valley was based in fruit orchards. It also appealed to Steve Jobs because he was a fruitarian when the company was formed, and only ate fruit.

It has nothing to do with the Beatles and Apple Records.

There’s no truth to the (admittedly appealing) rumour that the bite in the Apple logo represents the tree of knowledge.

Apple logo designer Jean Louis Gassée presented Jobs with two versions: one with a bite and one without. He never thought of biblical references, just that it looked cuter with a slice taken out of the side. And Jobs liked the bite version more.

Source: Branding Strategy Insider

The iPhone’s codename was M68, and from the time work started in 2004 to the time it launched, that was all it was known as inside Apple.

Secrecy was paramount on the iPhone project. The hardware guys never saw the software; and the software guys didn’t get to see the hardware. Few people inside Apple knew what the finished product would look like when Steve Jobs took to the stage.

We’ve heard, anecdotally, that iPhone development team and execs were trained to go quiet in meetings whenever they heard the phrase “We’re now going to talk about M68.” And listen out if anybody said: “What’s M68?”

Source

Apple employees often know when a team is working on something new, because a team of carpenters moves into the office and builds walls around their desk.

Walls are quickly erected with security doors and transparent windows are frosted. The employee carries on as before in a secure enclosure.

Around 2,700 of Apple’s Lisa computers are buried in a landfill in Utah, after the product failed to be successful when it launched in 1983.

For many years, Apple’s laptops had the glowing Apple logo upside down while in use, but the logo was flipped in the 1990s, apparently so that it would look better in Hollywood movies (some filmmakers would even put Apple stickers on the laptops to make the logo appear the right way up).

Originally, Apple thought that the Apple logo should be facing the right way when the user went to open the laptop, because otherwise people would attempt to open it from the wrong side.

In the first quarter of 2014, Apple earned more than Google, Facebook and Amazon combined.

Apple has so much spare cash (around $150 billion), it could buy Facebook. Alternatively, it could buy Netflix, Telsa, Twitter, Dropbox, Pandora and Spotify. Yes, all of them.

It won’t, of course. Instead, Apple has kicked off a stock buyback programme.

Jonathan Ive has worn what appears to be the same G-Star T-Shirt in every Apple product introduction video since 2000.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is the first and currently only openly gay person in the Fortune 500.

The Apple I first sold for $666.66, but it has not for satanic reasons. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has said that it was simply because he liked repeating numbers, and when the price worked out at $667 he changed it to $666.66 because it was “easier to write”.

Apple made a games console but it sucked.

It was called the Pippin, and was launched in 1995 for a $600, but only 100,000 were manufactured and reportedly less than half of those sold. In fact, it’s believed that there ended up being more Pippin accessories in existence than the console itself. Will Apple ever try again?

You might also like: 10 terrible Apple product failures

Apple’s original logo starred Sir Isaac Newton.

That logo was designed by Ronald Wayne, who you now know about thanks to fact number one. It featured a detailed picture of Newton sitting beneath a tree with an Apple about to fall on his head, but it was changed when the company realised that the logo was too detailed to be effective when printed small.

Now that you’ve brushed up on your Apple knowledge, test yourself by trying our five part quiz:

Round 1: Steve Jobs Round 2: Woz, Ive, Cook an co. Round 3: Apple Round 4: iOS Round 5: The Mac